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Club Penguin
Club Penguin is a multiplayer online role-playing game involving a virtual world containing a range of online games and activities by Disney Online Studious Canada Inc.Players use cartoon penguin-avatars and play in winter-set virtual world.After beta-testing, Club Penguin was first made available to the public on October 24,2005 and since expanded into a large online community growing to the extent that by the late 2007, it was claimed that Club Penguin had over 30 million user accounts.While free memberships available, revenue is predominatly raised to paid memberships which allows players to access a range of additional features.The success of Club Penguin led to New Horizon being purchase by The Walt Disney Company in August 2007 for the sum of 350 dollars, with an addtional 350 milion dollars in bonuses should specific targets be met by 2009. The game was designed for all ages.Thus a major focus of the developers has been on child safety, with a number of features introduced to the game to facilitate this including offering an "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode, whereby users select comments from a menu filtering that prevents swearing and the revelation of personal information, and mderators who patrol the game.The game has been criticized for teaching consumersium and allowing players to cheat. History and Development Lance Priebe and Lane Merrifield, employes at New Horizon Productions in Kelowna, British Columbia, saw a need for "social networking for kids".As Lane later described the situation, they decided to build Club Penguin when they were unsuccessful in finding "something that had some social components but was safe and not just marketed as safe for their own children.Lane and Lance approached their employer David Krysko, with the idea of creating a spinoff company to develop a new product. Prior to starting working on Club Penguin,Lance Priebe had been developing Flash web-based games in spare time.As part of the Rocketsnail Games, Lance released Experiminetal Penguins in 2000, which featured gameplay simlar to that which was incorperated into Club Penguin.Althrough Expriemental Penguins went offline in 2001, it was used as the inspiration for Penguin Chat, which was released shortly after the Experimental Penguins were removal.Thus,when Priebe, Merrifield and Krysko decided to go ahead with Club Penguin in 2003, they had Penguin Chat on which to base part of the design process.After 2 years of testing and development, the first version of Club Penguin went live on October 24,2005. Club Penguin started with 15,000 users and by March that number had reached 1.4 million a figure which almost doubled by September, when it hit 2.6 million.By the time Club Penguin was two years old, it had reached 3.9 million.At the point when they were purchased by Disney, Club Penguin had 12 million accounts of which 700,000 were paid subscribers and were generating $40 million in annual revenue. Althrough the owners had turned down lucrative advertising offers and venture capital investments in the past, in August 2007 they agreed to sell the company for the sum of $350.93 million.In addition, the owners were promised bonuses of up to $350 million if they were able to meet growth targets by 2009.In making the sale,Lane has stated that their main focus during negotiations was philosophical and that the intent was to provide themselves needed infrasture in order to continue to grow. March 11,2008 Club Penguin released the Club Penguin Improvement Project.This project allowed players to be part of the testing of new serversput into Club Penguin on April 14,2008.Player had a clone of their penguin made, to test these new servers for bugs and glitches.The testing was ended on April 4,2008. April 2008, Club Penguin opened its first international office in the UK for the local support and Disney announced in June 2008, plans to open an Australian office in August of that year.They opened the Australian Office in August 2008 and opened a Brazilian office in November 2008. Febuary 10,2009, Club Penguin released French and Portuguese versions of the game.On June 26,2009 a Spanish version for Latin America and Spain, was launched June 20,2011, Disney had forgotten to renew Club Penguin's domain name that expired on June 13 leading the game to see downtime.The game has re-opened as of June 21,2011.There were also many rumors saying Club Penguin was going to be discontinued or that Club Penguin has been hacked.No official compensation was given to paying members resulting in many complaint for reimbursement. In late 2010, Club Penguin was about to released a Chinese version, but many people outside China were playing the test version,so that they took it down.November 1,2011,Disney had launch a German version of the game.Within the first day over 10,000 German players signed up. Environment 'Club Penguin '''is divided into various rooms and district areas.IIlustrator Peter Welleman designed many of the first envrionment. Each player is provided with a igloo for their home.Members have the opinon of opening their igloo so other penguins can access it via the map, under "Member Igloos".Members may also purchase larger igloos and decorate igloos with items bought with virtual coins earned by playing min-games. At least one party is held on Club Penguin.In most cases, a free clothing items are available, both for paid members and free users.Also the parties provide member only rooms in which only members can access.Some major Club Penguin parties are its annual Halloween and Holiday Parties.Other large parties include the Music Jam, Adventure Party, Puffle Party and the Medieval Party. The Main Club Penguin room is the Town and this is where most players arrive when they log in the game.It has three internal rooms: Coffee Shop , Gift Shop and the Night Club.The Coffee Shop is modeled after a small coffee shop and contains a minigame called Bean Counters in which a penguin has to catch sacks of coffee beans launched from a truck and it also a main for penguins to go if they want to meet each other.Most of the time, the Coffee Shop is the only place decorated for only Anniversary Parties and where party hats are given. The Stage was released in November 2007 in the Plaza.Suscribed members can only buy costumes for the play, an option that non-members do not have.The script for the play is located at the bottom-right corner of the screen.When clicked, the list of lines is brought up.Each Month, a new play is released. Books In honor of Club Penguin's third anniversary in 2008, Club Penguin released many books that are published under the Snowball Press name.Outside of the virtual world, such books are published by Grosset & Dunlap and include guidebooks for the game as well as "choose-your-own-adventure" style books.The series includes The Ultimate Official Guide to Club Penguin Volume 1 by Ladybird Books, Stowaway Adventures at Sea'' by Tracy West, Stuck on Puffles by Ladybird Books, and Waddle lots of laughs by Rebeccahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_McCarthyMcCarthy. Languages *English *Espanol *French *German *Portuguese Did you know? *Club Penguin's Business Number is 1-888-861-4111. *Their email is: support@clubpenguin.com *There are 3 teams.The teams are Canada,Australia and Britain See More